The Enneagram of Personality is a diagramatic map of humanity reportedly deriving from diverse and ancient esoteric traditions. The name Enneagram derives from the Greek for nine (ennea) and refers to its formulation as nine points organized on the circumference of a circle. Each of the nine points refers to a personality or character type, and collectively they form a comprehensive depiction of human ‘error’, virtue and potential.

Each of nine types is associated with a particular
set of emotional, cognitive and behavioural inclinations or compulsions
that together form a basic worldview and modus operandi. At the core
of this edifice is a reliance on a particular emotional drive. Radiating
from this core emotion is a corresponding cognitive inclination, a particular
idea about the world. This serves both to shore up and to channel the
underlying emotion. Though the Enneagram affords many complex permutations
and nuances through a variety of considerations (such as Wings and Sub-types)
this emotional and cognitive bias is the nucleus of each of the nine
enneatypes.

According to Dr. Naranjo this emotion/cogniton diad
can be summarized for each personality type by the following key words:

Anger – Perfectionism

Pride – False abundance

Vanity – Self-deception, Attractiveness

Envy – False lack

Avarice – Detachment

Fear – Accusation

Gluttony – Indulgence, Fraudulence

Lust – Vengeance, Intensity

Indolence – Self-forgetting

It is from the perspective of one of these emotion/cognition
diads that each individual will construct behavioural strategies to defend
themselves against experience and reality. Whilst the emotional, cognitive
and behavioural strategy is particular to each ennea-type, broadly speaking
they serve the same ends – to limit the experience or awareness of anxiety
and suffering. Such avoidance is natural and inevitable, a necessary
survival mechanism in our negotiation of our relationship to ourselves
and to the world. We are all obliged by nature and by circumstance to
construct an identity, a strategy for presenting ourselves to the world.

Whilst enabling on the one hand, on the other hand
this same personality is limiting to the degree that its construction
requires the systematic negation of elements of ourselves or the world
that do not conform to its mould. To be in personality is therefore to
be out of contact with a more comprehensive view of the world. To be
in personality is to be wearing blinkers, or blue or red or green tinted
spectacles such that we see the world (including ourselves) as red, or
green or blue. It is to be on “automatic” plot, slightly roboticized,
and no longer free to respond to the world and reality from an uninhibited
emotional, cognitive or behavioural palette, from the free flow of instinct.
To be in personality is to have lost the spontaneity of the infant, and
the contact with self of the newly born.

The therapeutic function of
the Enneagram of Personality is to identify the precise form of rigidity
that we have constructed for ourselves in place of spontaneity and ‘being’.
Which suit of armour did we don at a certain point in our history, and
subsequently confuse for our skin? Which mask did we confuse with our
real face? To discover this armour or mask permits a degree of distinction
between our sense of personality and our sense self. By allowing this
distance we can begin to understand that we are more than we appear to
be, that our personality is not just the way we reveal ourselves in and
to the world, it is the way we have hidden or lost contact with much
of what we think and feel, and with the free flow of our instincts. We
can begin to wonder what it might be like ‘to be’ outside, or beyond
personality, and to shed light on that within us that has remained in
personality’s shadow. In theory, once we realize that our personality
is a manipulation of ourselves and the world, involving a degradation
in our ability to perceive and operate fully within reality, we can begin
to examine and reveal to ourselves new ways of thinking, feeling and doing.

To this end the Enneagram of Personality offers us
antidotes - attitudes and values that we can cultivate that will help
to loosen, in time, the grip of our passions and cognitive fixations
that constitute our “automatic” and defended self. Likewise, as a diagrammatic
system, the Enneagram permits us to locate other ways of being in the
world and our relationship to these ‘others’. Thus, the Enneagram provides
us not only with a diagnosis of our malady, but also with very loose
prescriptions, clues, pointers, and avenues to explore how we might become
more than we apparently are, ‘other’ than what we are, or re-discover
our capacity for spontaneity, understood as a non-automatic, healthy
and organismic response to reality.

It is on this shifting crossroads
between malady and cure, neurosis and virtue, that the long journey of
the work on self occurs.

Note: Much
information about the Enneagram, of varying quality, can be found on
the internet. Wikipedia is a fairly dispassionate place to start, if
needed, although it is worth pointing out that not all the attributes
described to personality are adhered to from Dr. Naranjo’s perspective
(for example, the use of Wings and the differentiation between Integration
Points and Disintegration points).

Note: Enneagram tests to diagnose types are freely
available on the internet. However given the intricacies of character
they are no substitute for critical self-observation over time. Naturally,
such tests incline towards rather crude assumptions and generalizations
about personality types and follow a tendency of ‘assigning’ people to
type, rather than permitting the preferable but often slower ‘discovery’
of type through the osmosis of self-insight and self-study.